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Ask the Flickr people for permission to create an account for "Random J. Hacker" or "A. Test Case" or some such equally nonexistant peron, with defined info that will never be changed (or useful for identity theft purposes).

Yep, this will actually be plan B.
Right now I've got some good leads on a way which doesn't actually require me to connect to Flickr (using Mock objects) and I'll give it a try as it would allow the testing to go through even without Internet connectivity.
But if this fails your suggestion (or, if it fails just creating a free test user with some stock photos in there, like pfig suggested on my blog) will be the way to go.

Of course, using mock objects means your module will install flawlessly for users but then promptly bomb out on them, should the Flickr API ever change. I’d ask Flickr if they don’t already provide an account for testing. I remember that dyndns.org provided one for their proto-webservice years ago – basically, internet-centuries in the past. If Flickr are worth anything they’ll have anticipated this.

That's a point I've considered myself, but then I don't think this sort of testing is supposed to catch that.
As far as I know testing is supposed to ensure that given a "perfect" response from Flickr the instalation works for the user. In other words the tests aim at is ensuring the user has the environment correctly setup in order to be able to use the modules (and, of course, that I didn't screw up i nsome way that breaks the modules on their setup).
Changes in the API will always break the modules and